Just a photo

Flower
Originally uploaded by sarabak

I still feel cheered by this photo I took with my phone a few weeks ago. First the flower fluttered down from a windowbox, outside a Tottenham Court Road pub. Passers-by didn't seem to see it, yet they never stepped on it either. (Well, eventually somebody did.) Meanwhile, these two people came and stood by it for ages, talking.

The NBCC awards

Sarah Bakewell How to Live 2011 Shankbone
Originally uploaded by david_shankbone

I like this picture by David Shankbone - it's of me clutching the podium so as not to collapse to the floor, two minutes after learning that I'd won the National Book Critics' Circle Biography Award last Thursday!

Soldiers

I saw this when I was walking in Hyde Park yesterday - though, strangely, I didn't notice how the colours and postures of the woman and the soldier echoed each other until I got it home and looked at it on the screen.  Which is weird because, given that I didn't notice it, I'm honestly not sure why I was taking the photo..

Across the centuries

There's a great New York Times piece out about me and Montaigne this weekend, by Patricia Cohen. I love the way she describes my style of biography - "a delightful conversation across the centuries".  Of course historical conversations can go badly wrong, like any other.  There can be arguments, misunderstandings, bullying, or a refusal to listen.  The wrong end of the stick is always there, temptingly easy to grasp.  But there can be enlightening, congenial encounters too. The best conversations help bring what Montaigne called "a gay and sociable wisdom".  At least, that's why I enjoy reading him.

Some writing to do now - then I'll go out in the snow and take some pictures.

Magnificent gremlins

A few days ago, news broke that the U.K. edition of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom was riddled with tiny errors, because the printers had inadvertently used the last-but-one version of the text.  Instead of the version to which Franzen had added his final amendments, they used the one before. This meant losing a few tweaks affecting characterisation, he says, but mainly he lost thousands of improvements to vocabulary and phrasing.

My sympathy for Franzen is so intense that I feel like weeping.  If this happened to me, I would rage, I would moan; I would ask why the gods hated me.  Every time I saw a copy of the thing in a bookshop, I would die a small death and wish I'd never written it at all. Better to have no book than to have one still haunted by those flabby adverbs and unnecessary intensifiers that you had eliminated just in time. Franzen spent nine years writing Freedom: I suspect this matters to him.

The good news is that Franzen is probably the only one who notices. The writer cares about every word; readers are less likely to bother, not because they are slapdash people but because they are reading. Just as a canoeist does not notice a pebble out of place on the bottom of a stream, few readers notice itsy-bitsy imperfections in a book.  This is so even when the readers are themselves writers. Yesterday's Guardian article quotes Blake Morrison, who reviewed Freedom; he sympathised with Franzen just as I do, but he had spotted nothing wrong.

This is a comforting truth - but it's not quite a full truth. Of course it matters. A finely sanded, polished, cliche-free text tells a better story.  It conjures up images more clearly, and its characters breathe more freely.  They are easier to love or hate or care about.

So I still weep for Franzen - even if Franzen is the only one who sees the pebbles out of place.

I was reading this news over breakfast yesterday - a fry-up with black pudding in Wigtown, Scotland, where I had gone to talk about Montaigne at the Wigtown Book Festival. 

After breakfast, but before my talk, I walked through the town, a place filled with bookshops and cafes.  In one cafe window I saw this: a collection of customers' favourite words, contributed, transcribed, and hung up to flutter in the breeze.

Then I bought a book, in one of Wigtown's second-hand shops: Canoe Errant on the Nile, by Major R. Raven-Hart.

Published in 1936, it's the story of his paddle up that river in search of all kinds of things.  He writes about crocodiles, temples, folk stories, Islam, and emperors. He talks about rowing in his canoe in the nude ("unless a sun-helmet and sunglasses count as clothes").  And he prefaces it all with an announcement of his main purpose in making the trip.  He says: "I wanted to test a pet theory about the way Egyptian sculptors worked, based on the study of museum exhibits. It proved quite false, and there is nothing about it in this book."

How beautiful is that? I bought Major Raven-Hart because of that sentence.  I'm planning to give it someone today, as a gift - someone I know would appreciate it - but meanwhile the book is sitting on my desk smiling at me.  It seems to want to tell me something. I think it wants to say that error can be a nasty little gremlin, but it can also be a magnificent achievement.

Open House in London

A weekend or two ago it was open day in London - lots of buildings flung their arms open to the masses.  More importantly, you could also wander around the City Square Mile and take pictures of buildings to your heart's content, without being arrested as a terrorist.

I tried my hand at some architecture - the Gherkin (from the outside) and the Lloyds Building (mostly from the inside). Here's a link to flickr for the set, if you fancy seeing them all.

But here's the one I like best: the Gherkin, reflected in a watery silvery way:

Thunder made out of diamonds

When I’m working from home there usually comes a point where I have to get up from my desk and rush out into the air, usually on the pretext of going to the supermarket or post office. But sometimes, once I get out into the street, I realise at once that I don’t need groceries and I have nothing to post.

When this happens, I keep walking past Balham tube station until I get to the best second-hand bookshop in the neighbourhood (also one of the best in London), My Back Pages.

I tend to come out with exactly one book, and it’s never one I had previously intended to buy. Last week it was a Penguin Classic I’d never heard of, by Irmard Keun, called Child of All Nations.

I bought it because I liked the cover:

Child of All Nations was written in 1938, and only translated into English in 2008 – by Michael Hoffman, who is best known for his translations of Joseph Roth. There’s a connection, for Irmgard Keun travelled round Europe for many years as Joseph Roth’s companion. Both were writers and bohemians, both drank too much, and both were in flight from the Nazis, who were burning their books.

The novel is the story of Kully, a young girl whose parents are doing just what Keun and Roth did. The father drifts from one European capital to the next, writing and boozing, and trying to charm or wheedle money out of people. Whenever he does get a few coins, he blows it on inviting impecunious poets and street-drinkers out for absinthe and rum. Meanwhile, Kully waits with her mother in Dutch and Belgian hotels which they cannot afford to leave, for that would mean paying the bill. She picks up languages by the half-dozen, meets children and adults, and plays with anything she happens to find, from rotting crabs to tiny balls of mercury spilled from a broken thermometer. She observes all: an eternally naïve narrator who misunderstands what is going on, but who – of course – really understands more than anyone. The adults are lost and often sad; Kully does not get it, and so she sees things as they really are.

It’s an exquisite, moving book, beautifully written (and beautifully translated). Kully’s father is an unforgettable character: warm, impulsive, generous; intimidating when drunk, shockingly irresponsible, yet somehow reassuring. When he is around, it seems nothing can go wrong; the trouble is, he is hardly ever around. Early on, he is described as having eyes which “sometimes looked as if they had swum far out to sea and weren’t completely back yet.” And when he gives a lecture in Poland, Kully (who isn’t sure what a lecture is) pictures it as a glittering spectacle in a vast castle, attended by thousands of people. It must, she imagines, “must be something like thunder made out of diamonds.”

This book is thunder made out of diamonds too, and it takes you far out to sea. I’m glad so few of the books I find are like this, or I’d never get anything else done; I’d read and re-read them, and perhaps forget to come back.

Here is Irmgard: